"Aru Kuxipa | Sacred Secret | Sagrado Segredo" presents a collaborative journey undertaken by the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto, pajés (spiritual leaders), artists from the Amerindian Huni Kuin people from the Jordão river, and TBA21. The exhibition unfolds as a pioneering experiment, establishing a zone of encounter with our "ancestral futures," an investigation of the teachings of plants, and the spiritual nature of being. It marks a crucial extension of the concerns that have been evident in Neto's oeuvre over the past 20 years: a celebration of the sensuality of life, the unity of bodies and nature, and a search for deeper forms of union and correspondences.
The spiritual center of the exhibition is demarcated by a kupixawa, a newly created communal space of gathering, sheltering shamanic rituals, celebrations, and individual contemplation, combined with earlier major works by the artist from TBA21's collection. Venerated Huni Kuin pajés, plant masters, and artists...are residing in Vienna for the preparation and initiation of the exhibition and during several residencies and enter into dialogue with Neto's artistic language through a diversity of knowledge, expressions, and experiences: music, songs, drawings, weavings, rituals, herbaria, use of medical and sacred plants, "teacher plants," and everyday objects.
Likewise, the accompanying symposium "The Rise of the Phyto Age" engages with the Huni Kuin's oral ancestral knowledge of healing plants and their sacred spiritual philosophy, published in Portuguese and the Hatxa Kuĩ language in Una Isĩ Kayawa ("Book of Healing") by Editora Dantes in collaboration with the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden Research Institute (JBRG). Initiated by pajés of the Huni Kuin, the symposium fuses age-old Amazonian medicine and curing rituals with European healing traditions and contextualizes anthropological and ethnobotanical perspectives as well as exploring the ecological, economic, and political dimensions of the cultivation of "teacher plants."
Una Isĩ Kayawa contains descriptions of the 109 plant species used in the indigenous therapies of the Huni Kuin and their curative properties, Aru Kuxipa "initiates" the English translation of the book in Vienna and engages with the large universe of indigenous knowledge, which has been unknown or sidelined and exoticized for centuries.
Unfolding in several institutional venues and over two continents, this collaborative exhibition involves partners in both Austria and Brazil. While the Kunsthalle Krems focuses on a retrospective view of Neto's nearly two decades of artistic production, TBA21 showcases the artist's latest explorations.
Entrada actualizada el el 09 nov de 2015
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